Pop Vultures

Tim Kring has words for fans of Heroes. Passionate. Obsessive, perhaps. And very, very demanding. “Our relationship with the audience is extremely tenuous,” he admits, before answering, yet again, the barrage of questions about exactly what went wrong in season two.

It’s day two of the Edinburgh TV festival, and Kring is sitting at the front of a packed room full of industry types who want to know the secret to the most successful international show currently filming. It’s also full of fans who want an explanation for what happened to their favorite show.

He’s a tall, slim man, decked out in denim and wearing a truly impressive mustache. He looks more like an aging hippy than a powerful Hollywood showrunner. He’s not an especially funny man. Unlike Steven Moffat, who followed him and seemed unable to speak in anything but highly quotable one-liners, he’s a thoughtful, careful speaker. It is immediately apparent that, whatever you thought of the last season of Heroes, he has applied that same level of thought and care to his series. He just didn’t always get it right, a fact he readily admits.

“Looking back…what I tried to do was duplicate season one’s idea of a slow build of storylines that would converge,” he explains. Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on what the fans wanted. They’d become used to “the adrenaline and pace of the third act and didn’t want to go back.” He also figured this out too late.

The writers only took four days off between seasons one and two, and they thought everything was just fine. “For us,” he says, working with the same writers, on the same stories, “there was a continuum.” For the fans, not so much.

Kring is well aware of the importance of the show’s devoted fans. He speaks with wonder of the show’s premiere at the 2006 Comic Con, when thousands of people piled into the screening room, buzzing with excitement about the show’s premise. He spends time on message boards and generally speaks warmly of those that helped make the show so successful. He listens to people’s opinions and appears to take their ideas on board. At the same time, he admits that “this relationship [with the fans] has been very complicated for our show to deal with.”

Part of this is due to the simple logistics of shooting the series. At any time, they’re at least ten episodes ahead of what is currently airing, making it impossible to make quick adjustments. No matter how much “violent anger” he encountered on the Internet, the most he could do was tweak future episodes and hope that the eps already shot would be enough to appease the Internet hordes. Unfortunately, with the writers’ strike, he was never able to make those tweaks.

Will he be able to do so for the third season? The signs are good. His history as a television writer should work for him. This is a man who got his start writing one of the most infamous episodes of Knight Rider ever – the one when KITT becomes possessed by a voodoo queen. He was hired to write the script for Teen Wolf 2 and given a week and a half to churn it out. Quality work? Not so much. It did, however, provide an unexpected skill set. “I took any job that came my way. My view of working as a writer was trying to adapt to what anybody needed.” At the same time, this journeyman’s approach to the craft ensured that he developed something of a short attention span, which is reflected in his own shows. The downside of this is the constant influx of new characters (sadly, even when faced with such frank and honest answers, no one dared to ask what he was thinking when he brought in the Emo Wonder Twins). The upside, however, is the ability to switch gears quickly and make adjustments to the show.

The volume structure of the series is key to doing just that. It gives the show a chance to wrap up old storylines and invites new viewers to jump on board. Plus, it allows them to avoid the question of whether or not there’s an ending, an issue which has at times frustrated viewers of other high concept shows like Lost or Alias. With eight separate storylines occurring at the same time, Kring is confident that they can give at least one answer a week, insisting that “no question is so precious we can’t tell you the answer.” If he made the viewers wait two and a half years for an answer, it wouldn’t matter how big the question is. People are going to be disappointed. He is determined to avoid that.

Does this mean a more focused volume III, then? Kring seems to think so. The strike gave him time to reevaluate the show and figure out what worked in the first season. The early episodes were based on “primal questions” of identity and community, which were soon replaced with plot questions that lacked the same resonance for viewers. Volume III will return to the broader questions, bringing in issues of free will and predisposition. “Core characters are confronted with a fork in the road. Are they good or are they evil?” Sadly, I don’t think this fork is literal, as I would dearly love to see Sylar receive a deadly fork to the brain, but it does bode well for greater moral ambiguity for the main characters. Who doesn’t love a bit of morally gray storytelling?

Kring would love to move down to fewer episodes a year, as Lost has done, in order to avoid dealing with “the art of the stall” in the middle episodes. Unable to get NBC to agree to that (since there is no way NBC would give up a single episode of the hit show), he’s instead planning separate volumes. Volume III, Villains, premieres September 22, and will be followed by the fourth volume, Fugitives.

Whether the kinks have been ironed out is yet to be seen, but the trailer for season 3 (see sidebar) is about as shiny and pretty as I could have hoped, and I’ll definitely be tuning in to see what happens next. I may be one of those very demanding fans, but Kring convinced me: this show deserves another chance.

What about you? Will you be returning in September to see what happens to your favorite — and less favorite — heroes?

Related posts:

• Steven Moffat talks about Doctor Who
• Fringe screened at the Edinburgh TV festival